How much should you spend on a gaming PC is a very open-ended question.
It has so many determining factors, such as the types of games you want to play, the sort of settings you want to play at, and your available budget. As with almost any enthusiast piece of leisure technology, you can spend hundreds or thousands; but there are a few notable sweet spots where you’ll get the most for your money.
In general, you’ll be spending somewhere between £1,000 and £1,500 for a great all-around gaming PC that can play just about everything. But if you want to make the most of your budget, or have a little more to spend, you can get something very special indeed.
Here are a number of Chillblast systems that fit into specific budgets and needs, to help you figure out just how much should you spend on a gaming PC.
The best gaming PC under £1,000
If you want to play older AAA games, emulated games, esports games, or indie games that aren’t too graphically demanding, then you can get by with an affordable gaming PC with entry-level components. They’ll still represent a huge uplift in gaming performance over most non-gaming PCs, and any PC without a dedicated graphics card.
A great example of this is the Chillblast Next Day Core gaming PC, which looks fantastic and comes with some of the best affordable gaming components you can buy.
For its starting price of £820, you get an Intel Core i3-10105F processor, with four cores, support for eight simultaneous threads, and an impressive 4.4GHz boost clock speed. That’s more than enough for older games that are more CPU bound, and for the extreme demands some emulators place on gaming PCs when playing older console games.
For hitting high frame rates in esports games, the Nvidia GTX 1650 is a great entry-level gaming graphics card. It’ll ensure that your FPS in games like League of Legends, DotA 2, or CS:GO sit in the multiple hundreds, ensuring a responsive and smooth gaming experience – especially if you pair this system with a high refresh rate monitor.
To ensure your operating system boots up fast, your games load quickly, and the whole system remains responsive no matter what you’re doing, this affordable gaming PC is also packed with 16GB of high-speed DDR4 memory, and half a terabyte of ultra-fast NVMe storage.
That’s more than enough space for an expansive game library and makes sure that no background tasks will impede your performance, whatever you’re playing.
The best £1,000 gaming PC
The £1,000 mark is a keystone in the PC gaming industry.
It’s where you start to get a lot of gaming power for your money, giving you access to a much wider array of games to play, and the option of turning on some of the higher-end visual settings for a better-looking gaming experience.
You’ll still be restricted to gaming at 1080p, but frame rates will be high and you’ll notice a big difference over the more affordable gaming PCs just by spending that few hundred pounds more.
The best gaming PC for around £1,000 is the Chillblast Fusion Sentinel 1660 Super gaming PC. It supercharges the CPU, GPU, and storage, for an altogether more capable gaming machine.
If you want to play some of the latest AAA games at smooth frame rates, or want to really push some of the best looking games of years gone by, then this system has all the hardware you need and then some.
At its heart, the Chillblast Fusion Sentinel comes equipped with the excellent Core i5-10400F processor. Its 4.3GHz boost clock speed makes it an excellent gaming processor, whether you’re playing older or newer games, while its six cores and 12 threads make it well suited to tackling some of the latest games which can really make use of those added cores.
A Step Up In Graphical Power
For a more visually exciting gaming experience and the option of playing some of the newer AAA games out there, this PC is fitted with an Nvidia GTX 1660 Super – one of the fastest graphics cards of the Nvidia 16-series and a very capable GPU.
It has all the power you need to run older games like The Witcher III: Wild Hunt at maximum settings at 1080p at a steady 60 FPS, or more modern games like Cyberpunk 2077 at medium settings, 1080p, with a steady 30 FPS.
Esports games and indie games are a breeze for a gaming PC like this, easily hitting hundreds of FPS at 1080p or beyond. In those sorts of lightweight games, you may even want to up your resolution to 1440p for a more detailed gaming experience, although that will sacrifice frame rates and some measure of responsiveness.
Elsewhere in the build, you can enjoy 16GB of high-speed memory, a 500GB high-speed NVMe SSD for super-fast game load times and responsiveness, plus 2TB of backup hard drive storage for handling larger game libraries, or storing your most precious photos, videos, and movies.
As with every Chillblast gaming PC, the Fusion Sentinel enjoys excellent build quality and cable management, as well as a five-year warranty.
The best £1,500 gaming PC
If you want to play games at 1440p resolution, hit a consistent 60 FPS at ultra settings in AAA games, or really push your esports games to take full advantage of high refresh rate monitors, then you need to spend a little more to get it.
At the £1,500 mark, you can get yourself not only high-end CPUs and memory but cutting edge graphics cards with some serious power behind them.
The Chillblast Next Day Zen RTX 3060 Gaming PC is a great example of a mid-range system with fantastic specifications.
It pairs an AMD Ryzen 5 5600G, six-core, 12 thread CPU, with an Nvidia RTX 3060 12GB graphics card. Together they are more than enough for super high frame rate gaming at 1080p and open up the option of 1440p at high detail settings for more atmospheric gaming experiences.
The RTX 3060 is an important upgrade with this system too, since it comes with both RT and Tensor cores. These unlock two exciting features for your new gaming PC: hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and deep learning super sampling (DLSS).
Added Capabilities
Ray tracing is used in a number of new and upcoming games to massively improve their lighting and realism, delivering real-time shadows, and far more believable in-game environments.
It can be a very demanding feature to enable, though, which is why you need a modern graphics card from the Nvidia RTX 2000, RTX 3000, or AMD RX 6000 GPU generations to enjoy it. The RTX 3060 is the most affordable, current-generation GPU that enables it, making it a great starting point for your ray tracing gaming journey.
If you find that you aren’t getting as high frame rates in games as you like, or that ray tracing is still a bit taxing on your GPU, that’s where DLSS comes into play.
DLSS dynamically upscales your game, while letting it render at a lower resolution. This improves the visual quality of your gaming experience, without impacting frame rates. It can also work the other way, letting you step down in resolution while maintaining consistent visual quality, at the same time as improving your frame rate.
The Chillblast Next Day Zen RTX 3060 gaming PC also comes equipped with 16GB of high-speed 3,200MHz DDR4 memory and a half-terabyte of M.2 NVMe SSD storage, for fast boot times, faster game load times, and a responsive and snappy system, no matter what you do with it. It has an 80+ Gold standard power supply too, so works efficiently and quietly.
Another advantage of this particular gaming PC is that it’s part of the Chillblast Next Day range. That means if you order it before 1 PM, it’ll ship out the same working day, getting you your new £1,500 gaming PC that bit faster.
Best £2,000 gaming PC
Ready to step up your games to a higher frame rate at 1440p, or even dabble with 4K resolution gaming? You’ll need something more powerful still.
At around the £2,000 mark, you unlock a new realm of gaming performance, with faster processors, and much, much more powerful graphics cards for an ultra exciting gaming experience.
The Chillblast Fusion Panther Gaming PC takes a major leap in gaming potential by incorporating two of the best gaming components of their respective generations.
At its heart, the Ryzen 5 5600X six-core CPU is a stellar gaming processor. It offers high single-threaded and multi-threaded performance and delivers high frame rates and a responsive gaming experience.
Coupled with that is the generation-defining, RTX 3070.
Next-Generation Graphics
Able to beat out any GPU that came before it, the RTX 3070 delivers amazing gaming performance in both 1440p and 4K resolution. It lets you turn up every detail setting to its absolute maximum while enjoying smooth frame rates, whatever you’re playing.
It also plays host to a much greater array of RT and tensor cores than the lower-end RTX 3000 GPUs. This lets you enjoy higher ray tracing settings in compatible games, and your PC takes less of a performance hit when doing so.
This isn’t a true 4K gaming card, in that you won’t be able to play every game at the absolute bleeding edge and have high frame rates, but it’s capable and versatile enough that you have the option of turning on anything you like – you’ll just need to toggle a few things to your taste to get the best frame rates while doing so.
Elsewhere in this gaming PC, you can enjoy high performance, quiet cooling on both the CPU and system fans, an attractive and compact Cooler Master NR200P tempered glass gaming case that lets you look at all your lovely internal hardware whenever you want, and heaps of storage space.
With a 500GB PCIE 4 NVMe SSD, you have all the space you need for loading your favourite games quicker than ever before, and there’s a 1TB SSD backup drive for your wider game library and any other files and folders you need quick access to.
Best £2,500+ gaming PC
If you want the ultimate gaming PC that can deliver high frame rate gameplay at 4K resolution, with ray tracing and all other settings turned up to their fullest, you are going to have to dig a little deeper to afford it.
£2,500 is around the baseline for that sort of performance, as it gets you one of the top-performing graphics cards and an all-around solid gaming system to back it up.
Take the Chillblast Official Williams Esports Ultimate gaming PC.
It comes with an Intel Core i7-10700K CPU, 16GB of high speed DDR4 memory and an Nvidia RTX 3080 10GB graphics card. That’s (almost) as good as it gets in modern gaming, delivering blazingly fast performance that easily outstrips every GPU that ever came before, and most of the modern-day competition too.
You’ll be able to play the latest and greatest AAA games at 4K resolution with all settings at their fullest, and still maintain a steady 60 FPS in most cases.
But you want more? There are a few more steps on the PC gaming ladder you can go.
Big Budget Beasts
For just over £3,000, the Chillblast Fusion Palladium 3080 Ti gaming PC upgrades the processor to the latest Intel Alder Lake design with a full 10 cores at your disposal.
The memory is doubled to 32GB for extra performance in AAA games and improved responsiveness in video editing and transcoding. Best of all, you get the RTX 3080 Ti – a graphics card that is about as powerful as you can get without straying into professional-grade GPUs.
If you want the ultimate AMD gaming PC, consider the Chillblast Fusion Testarossa instead. This insane gaming PC combines the 12-core AMD Ryzen 9 5900X with an RX 6900 XT. It’s the fastest AMD system possible today and will absolutely obliterate any game you throw at it, no matter the settings.
